Over the course, students will learn fundamental techniques of data collection preparation, and analysis with digital trace data in the social sciences. In this, we will focus on working with the microblogging-service Twitter. Over the course, students are expected to become proficient in the use of two programming languages, Python and R. The course will be offered as a Blockseminar on two weekends in October and November.

The course is designed for students without prior training in programming or exmploratory data analysis. Still, by the end of course students are expected to independently perform theory-driven data collections on the microblogging-service Twitter and use these data in the context of a series of specified prototypical analyses.

We will start the course by focusing on conceptual issues associated with the work with digital trace data. Students will then learn to use fundamental practices in the use of the programming language Python. Following this, we will collect data from Twitter’s APIs through a set of example scripts written in Python. After downloading data from Twitter through Python, we will load these data into a SQLite database for ease of access and flexibility in data processing tasks. Finally, we will discuss a series of typical analytical procedures with Twitter-data. Here, we will focus on counting entities and establishing their relative prominence, time series analysis, and basic approaches to network analysis. For these analyses, we will predominantly rely on R.